The Two John Kerrys Will We Get the Populist or the Lord of
Special Interests?
by Doug Ireland

www.dissidentvoice.org
February 10, 2004First Published in the
LA Weekly

John
Kerry is a man with two faces. There’s the fire-breathing populist whose
thundering stump speeches against special interests made him Comeback Kerry,
who won in Iowa and New Hampshire and became the Democrats’ indisputable
front-runner. And then there’s Corporate Kerry, who has taken more money
from lobbyists in the last 15 years than any other senator, according to an
analysis of Federal Election Commission data compiled by the nonpartisan
Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) — and who has repeatedly carried water
for the special interests that smothered him in campaign cash.

Comeback Kerry would also
like to be known as Campaign Reform Kerry, the principal co-sponsor, with
the late Paul Wellstone, of the Clean Money, Clean Elections bill that would
take special-interest cash out of politics in federal elections and replace
it with full public financing of campaigns. Kerry has repeatedly boasted of
this on the stump — as in the January 6 debate, when he said proudly, “Paul
Wellstone and I together wrote the Clean Elections law.” In the 106th, 107th
and 108th Congresses, Kerry’s name was on the bill, which has yet to become
law. Then Wellstone, the Senate’s liberal conscience, died — and Kerry
started running for president. Guess what? In the current, 108th Congress,
Cautious Kerry, the decorated war hero, went AWOL, refusing to reintroduce
the bill he now boasts about — leaving it with no sponsor in the Senate.

On primary night in New
Hampshire, in his victory speech, Kerry again repeated the applause line
that won for him: “I have a message for the influence peddlers and the
special interests: We’re coming. You’re going. And don’t let the door hit
you on the way out.”

“It’s very hard for Kerry
to utter this rhetoric without some hollowness to it,” according to Charles
Lewis, the former investigative journalist who heads the
Center for Public
Integrity and whose quadrennial series of books on
The Buying of the President have become best-sellers. Kerry, Lewis says,
“has been brought to you by special interests.”

Example: Kerry’s “largest
campaign contributor lobbies on behalf of telecommunication interests,” and
Kerry “pushed the legislative priorities of its clients in the wireless
industry,” according to research for the CPI’s 2004 book (available on its
Web site). That contributor, the powerhouse Boston law firm and lobbying
shop Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, is where Kerry’s brother
Cameron — a major Kerry-campaign insider — works, and where Kerry’s former
chief of staff, David Leiter, is a lobbyist. Mintz, Levin has given at least
$231,000 to Kerry.

According to CPI, Mintz,
Levin advertises communications law among its areas of expertise and lobbies
on behalf of wireless-industry clients such as AT&T Wireless Service, XO
Communications Inc. and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet
Association. CTIA is the trade association of the wireless industry. The
center found that CTIA-affiliated companies and their employees have
contributed at least $152,000 to Kerry and that since 1999 Kerry has taken
positions that closely reflect the legislative agenda of CTIA. He sponsored
two bills that CTIA lobbied for and co-sponsored six more. Not only do
Kerry’s assiduous efforts on behalf of the telecommunications industry help
his brother’s clients, a big chunk of the combined fortune of Kerry and his
wife — perhaps as much as $47.1 million — is in telecommunications stock
affected by the pro-CTIA legislation Kerry has carried.

Another example is the
deregulation of the securities industry. An industry-windfall bill with an
Orwellian name, the Securities Litigation Reform Act, was promise number
nine in Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America. It stripped legal protections
from defrauded investors and made it harder for them to recover damages with
a “loser pays” provision; repealed application of the federal rackets law to
financial transactions; and sharply curtailed monitoring of Wall Street
abuses. A 1995 New York Times editorial called this boon to investment
bankers, securities manipulators, and Enron/WorldCom-style corporations and
their frauding go-go execs “a threat to American civil justice.” But Kerry
not only voted for the bill, he voted to override Bill Clinton’s veto of it.
Kerry’s reward: He’s raked in $1,669,000 in contributions from the special
interests that benefited from the law, like FleetBoston Financial, CitiGroup,
Goldman Sachs and other similar firms.

In this week’s Newsweek,
crack investigative reporter Michael Isikoff — in
an article entitled “Cash
and Kerry” — unveils letters from Kerry to Johnny Chung, a star of the 1996
campaign-finance scandals, who pleaded guilty to giving $28,000 illegally to
Kerry’s and Bill Clinton’s campaigns (the money turned out to have come from
wire transfers by the head of Chinese military intelligence). In 1996, Kerry
— in the fight of his life for re-election against then-Massachusetts
Governor Bill Weld — helped grease the way for getting a corporation run by
one of Chung’s cronies listed on the stock exchange by arranging a private
meeting with the SEC. Kerry’s reward: Chung raised him $10,000 at a Beverly
Hills fund-raiser. Kerry has always claimed he never knew Chung until the
fund-raiser — but the Newsweek revelations show Kerry, in a handwritten“Dear
Johnny” letter, wrote to Chung months earlier that “It means a lot to have
someone like you on my team as I face the toughest race of my career.”
Newsweek adds that Kerry used his position as a member of the Senate Finance
Committee to collect $3 million from firms with an interest in the
committee’s work.

With all this sort of thing
in Kerry’s past and present, it’s no wonder that the
Center for Responsive
Politics’ director, Larry Noble, told the Washington Post that “it’s harder
for someone like Kerry to take on” Bush over special interests “because he’s
taken money from . . . a lot of the same” corporate sectors. The fat cats
have flocked to Kerry: 55 percent of his presidential campaign’s cash comes
from $2,000 contributors, meaning he’s closing in on Bush (who gets 73
percent from such big-check writers), according to The New York Times.
There’s more. Kerry the “populist” voted in 2000 to shred the Community
Reinvestment Act, which obliged banks to service impoverished areas and lend
them money. Kerry voted just two years ago to repeal the Public Utility
Holding Company Act, designed to keep energy prices to consumers low by
forbidding utilities companies to invest speculatively in businesses outside
the energy field.

Kerry’s Janus-like profile
isn’t confined just to serving the special interests while denouncing them
to win the Democratic nomination. He voted for the blank check for war in
Iraq — and now denounces Bush for “lies” he once believed. On October 9,
2002, Kerry told the Senate, “Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop
nuclear weapons when most nations don’t even try? . . . Iraq has chemical
and biological weapons . . . Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles
capable of delivering chemical- and biological-warfare agents.” Of course,
every single one of those statements about Iraq has since been proved to be
empty rhetoric.

So, the question before
Democratic voters is: If you cast your ballot for John Kerry, which one will
you get?

Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator
whose articles appear regularly in The Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These
Times among many others. This article first appeared in the
LA Weekly.